VOLUNTEERS ROLL OUT THE GREEN CARPET AT CLARA'S HOUSE

Dennis Rodkin. Special to the TribuneCHICAGO TRIBUNE

Forget those "Don't walk on the grass" signs. At Clara's House, an Englewood facility for homeless women and their children, the word soon will be: "Please walk on the grass. Play on it. Roll on it. Lie on it, if you like." When Home&Garden readers and staffers got together with horticulture professionals and Clara's House residents to build a garden at the shelter last May, the hundreds of plants we installed brought a new spirit and abundant color to a space that had been dreary and weed-choked. But those plants filled only about half the open space surrounding a playground; at the time, the remainder had to be left unplanted, a mix of dirt, weeds and struggling lawn grass.

But on Sept. 11, that space was filled with a lush green carpet of sod donated by Wiesbrock Turf Farms of West Chicago. Duane Henry, grounds supervisor at The Morton Arboretum and a volunteer at the May installation, had made it his mission to secure sod and volunteers for a fall installation. Once Wiesbrock gave him the 210 square feet of grass, Henry rounded up arboretum employees, Home&Garden staff members, and a few Chicago Tribune readers-18 volunteers in all-to help him carpet the lot with green.

Actually, there were two generous offers of sod: Michele Garden, one of our May reader/workers, suggested to her employer, Kia Motors of America, that the company donate sod and organize employee volunteers to install it. But the Kia offer came in after Henry's. So instead, Kia has promised to participate in next year's Garden Raising.

Just as in May, several children staying at Clara's House pitched in enthusiastically. They rolled out lengths of sod, helped tamp it down and vowed to warn other kids off the sod for a few weeks so it can get established.

The sod accomplishes two things, one of them aesthetic and the other pragmatic.

On the aesthetic side: The garden we installed as designed by landscape architect Tony Tyznik is meant to be an oasis of flowers and foliage in a neighborhood that has little of either. It is, but its valuable visual impact was diluted for the first few months by the fact that the shrubs and flowers curved around a lawn that had gone to weeds and dirt. Now, set against the rich green sod, the plantings can delight the eye as they were intended.

Pragmatically, too, the sod makes a visible boundary between planted garden and play area. Without a clear edge, it was probably inevitable that younger Clara's House residents had trampled quite a few plants at the front edge of the garden and around the edges of pathways.

Tempie Hampton, the facility's director, notes that as a transitional home, Clara's House has seen its entire population turn over since the May installation. "The people who helped plant it were careful not to step on plants--and they told everybody else to watch where they walked," Hampton says. Newcomers don't have the same feeling of ownership in the garden, she says, so "no matter how many times we say to stay out of the plants, they still don't notice."

Now, the sod clearly indicates that some areas of the lot are for playing in, while others are to be protected. Henry further discouraged residents from walking in the plants by laying new pathways of woodchips from the gate to the playground and from there to the patios. The chips were a donation from B. Haney and Sons in Lombard. "Maybe we should have known back in May that people were going to take the shortest route and not put plants in their way," Henry says.

While there, the volunteers also planted several dozen daffodil bulbs donated by readers Bill and Betty Martner of Aurora and pulled out the perennials and shrubs that had been planted in containers on the patios in May. These all got permanent homes in bare spots in the garden.